Widen Your Dynamic Range to Take Better Photographs

What is HDR?

High Dynamic Range (HDR) photography is a method that aims to increase the dynamic range of a photographic image.

Why use HDR?

Have you ever tried to take a landscape or portrait photograph only to find some areas (such as the sky) over-exposed, whilst other areas such as the near horizon or a even a face are under-exposed? This is due limitations with the dynamic range of the camera with respect to light. The human eye can see anywhere from 10-14 F-stops (aperture of amount of light reaching the sensor) of dynamic range, which surpasses most compact cameras, smart phones and low-end DSLRs.

How to produced HDR?

Instead of taking a single photograph of a scene, HDR uses multiple photographs, taken at different exposures (usually three at -2eV; 0eV & +2eV as shown below). These exposures are then combined to produce the final image. Note that you will also need to set your camera control mode to Aperture Control.

0eV Exposure +2eV Exposure -2eV Exposure

What equipment do I need?

HDR utilises the ’auto-bracketing feature’ available on most modern DSLR cameras. You will also require post-processing software to blend the photographs to produce one seamless image. HDR is now available on Smart Phones and the phone does all the work for you. In low light conditions a tripod is strongly recommended.

Case Study

There are a number of shipwrecks south of Pin Mill (behind the Butt & Oyster Pub) along the River Orwell in Suffolk that is a perfect setting to try out HDR Photography due to the wide contract in colours in the scene. I went down early evening just before sunset to take some photographs. The three photographs shown were taken at –2eV; 0eV and +2eV (3 different F-stops) using a Nikon 5100 DSLR with control mode set to ‘Aperture Priority’. I used a tripod and a remote shutter cable release as I was using a slow shutter speed and wanted to avoid camera shake between the shots. This prevents mis-alignment or ‘ghosting’ in post-processing when combining the shots to produce the final HDR image above. I used Photomatix Pro v6 by HDRSoft to generate the HDR, but there are other choices available such as Topaz Adjust and Photoshop CC or Photoshop Elements. I primarily use Photomatix as it has a dedicated HDR post-processing engine and comes with a number of presets as well as the flexibility to adjust the final image.

To Have or to Have Not?

To enable HDR as mentioned it is useful to have an auto-bracketing feature on your DSLR camera. However, if there is no auto-bracketing (such as on the Nikon D3100) you can work around this manually by setting the camera to Aperture mode and using the ev (+/-) exposure compensation button to change the aperture. Take one shot at the correct exposure for the scene, then use exposure compensation to increase the exposure to +2ev taking another shot, then finally adjusting the exposure compensation to –2ev and taking one final shot. However, in order to eliminate ghosting caused by camera shake, it becomes essential to use a tripod and a remote shutter release (cable or wireless).

Post-Processing to HDR

Photomatix Pro has an easy to use interface. You simply browse to the photos taken previously and load them into the interface. You can select options for noise and ghost reduction and then the processing engine takes care of the rest and you end up with a number of pre-set choices for the final output. I often choose the ‘painterly’ pre-set and then tweak it with the ‘HDR Settings’ controls on the left panel. The nice thing about Photomatix Pro is that you can save a new pre-set and then run a batch process so if you have multiple scenes that you want to convert to HDR it is all done automatically for you. It can be easy to over-do the amount of HDR leaving the image grainy with over-done colours but you can always use the opacity slider to tone adjust and tone back. I will talk about HDR processing in much more detail in a future blog.

There are some useful references on-line for how to take HDR photographs included below.

Video: How to shoot HDR Videos by Ray Salisbury

Book: Practical HDR (2nd Edition) by David Nightingdale

I hope you found this blog useful. Constructive comments are always welcome. Please note the photographic images that appear on this blog are not full/high resolution. High resolution images (plus many others) can be purchased as professional quality prints or mounted on various media through my on-line shop.

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